In some instances a document, such as an essay or a memorandum, may be thought of as a single individually readable block of data or “story”. In the context of an essay or memorandum the story generally flows in a linear fashion from the front or beginning of the document to the back or end of the document. In other instances, a document may contain more than one story. In some such cases the stories may be arranged in a consecutive manner, such that an entirety of a first story is presented and then an entirety of a second story is presented. In other instances, such as in a newspaper or magazine scenario, the stories may be presented as interposed fragments of stories or story fragments.
Modern documents are often defined using a markup language such as XML or HTML and described as markup documents. Modern documents may also be classified as fixed layout documents or adaptive documents. Adaptive documents re-layout the contents of the document based on the desired overall size of the content, such as a single sheet of paper or the size of a display window. Fixed layout documents describe where each discrete unit of a page's content, such as an image or a single run of text, is positioned on the page. Fixed layout documents are also frequently markup documents. The XML Paper Specification (XPS) describes one such document format (the XPS Document format) that is a fixed layout document and also a markup document.
Fixed layout markup document formats, such as the XPS Document format, define a document as a set of markup elements. Individual markup elements define portions of document content and a location where the content should be displayed within the document. Fixed layout markup document formats do not natively handle structural information relating to the document's markup; such as to recognize that a particular portion of the markup relates to a particular story. Accordingly, fixed document formats do not readily distinguish between multiple stories within a document.